Small Fry

DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T TELL YOU DEPARTMENT * * * One of the things they sort of run to down here at Harvard is examinations, so now is as good a time as any to give the boys who are coming to Harvard the low down on how to pass the examinations here. There is just a little knack to it, and if you know the knack you don't have to spend a couple of months flunking exams finding out for yourself the curves of the examinations. In the first place, it should be understood that the Harvard method of answering a question is one calculated to baffie the least exacting cross-examining lawyer. Rule 1 is never to answer a question Yes or No. On Harvard examinations they give you a question that can be answered simply by Yes or No, but to your surprise when you look the exam over you find that answering the question is supposed to take you half an hour. The problem is what to do with the time left over. If you solve that you have the Harvard examination system right under your thumb.

In order to fill in that twenty-nine minutes, after you get through answering Yes or No, you first look the question over and decide what the topic of the question is. For instance; if the question is "Will a Ford go faster than a Buick?" On first appearance that question looks like a natural for a good old "Yes" or a good old "No," but under the Harvard system that isn't the half of it. First you look the question over, and come to the conclusion that the general subject is automobiles. Then you just go ahead and get as much as you know about automobiles down on paper before the thirty minutes is up as you can. That's all there is to it. The instructors know whether a Ford will go faster than a Buick--they aren't interested in that at all. The chances are that they know that you know too, and they figure that even if you don't know the chances are fifty-fifty that you will guess the right answer. So you see just answering Yes or No doesn't do any good at all.

You rhapsodize for five minutes on the dramatic rise of Henry Ford from his little bicycle shop in West Wheeling to the position of head of a great auto company. You talk for ten minutes about knee action, down-draft carburetor, no draft ventilation, and free wheeling. Maybe you throw in a couple af anecdotes about the time you went to the automobiles show. Then and only then have you answered the question. If you know your stuff about automobiles, and if you are a fast writer, and if the man who corrects the book has not had too much for supper, you stand a pretty good chance of cracking, as the boys say, a good mark.

Another little ruse that some of the Andover boys at Harvard have found very satisfactory consists of learning all the dope on a given subject down cold, cold, cold. It doesn't make so much difference what subject you pick, as long as you know it backwards and forwards. Then, when you tackle a question on the exam, you start your answer by repeating the question on your paper; then you rack your brain for some way of connecting the question up to the subject which you know cold. Having found this missing link, you write that in and then write down all the dope about this pet subject of yours. In most cases the results are satisfactory. One man we know had a quiz in economics every week last term. Before each quiz he would go over the work. This done, he would pick the question he thought the instructor would be most likely to ask on the quiz. Then he would go over all his material again, and work up a good hot answer to that question. Then he would go into the quiz, and, no matter what question was asked, he would write down the answer he had arranged already, trying, if possible, to link his answer up by some vague thread to the question asked. He averaged better than a "B" on the quizzes for the term.

This all may seem pretty lengthy and involved, but it is valuable information. Follow it, and you can't go wrong. It is several years of experience bundled into a column--it is Andover at-Harvard's gift to their future colleagues from the largest and best preparatory school in the country.--The Philippians.